Chatbot News

10 Popular Bots to Follow on Twitter

From Grammar Police (@_grammar_) to Accidental Haiku (@accidental575), check out 10 of the best Twitter bots to follow in 2018.

May 15, 2018

Twitter was built for humans but has become a fertile ecosystem for chatbots, also known as bots. An easy-access API allows even novice programmers to create bots—in pretty much any modern coding language—that can autonomously tweet, retweet, reply, and even Direct Message.

According to new research from University of Southern California and Indiana University, approximately 15 percent of Twitter accounts are bots rather than people. Many of these bots are imitating real, human users. Although some aren’t doing a very good job, a lot of Twitter bots are thoughtfully crafted and remarkably clever. They combine human ingenuity with easy automation to create bots that are funny, surreal, helpful and, at times, even beautiful.

Here’s a look at 10 popular bots on Twitter that are a credit to the platform.

1. wayback_exe

This Twitter bot uses the Wayback Machine to pull images of websites from the late 1990s. Every two hours, it posts a page name, date, and screenshot from some wild relic of the early internet. The results are often ridiculous, surreal, and nostalgic.

2. Grammar Police

Imagine mixing up “there” and “their” while tweeting and then having some random user correct you. It might seem like a troll, but it also could be the Grammar Police bot, designed to alert random users when their grammar is wrong. The bot is rarely funny on its own, but the way people respond to it can be quite entertaining. Some users take the critique in stride, and others get a little more hostile. But the Grammar Police bot never flinches—even when it’s boldly correcting the police.

It might have been better if you, @EdenPolice, had posted “There is [a lot] of standing” instead. ‘Allot’ is a verb.

3. Pentametron

There’s a whole world of “found poetry” on Twitter, and Pentametron is finding some of the best.

This Twitter bot is dedicated to identifying tweets written in iambic pentameter (the meter preferred by Shakespeare) and pairing them with a rhyming couplet from another random user. The result is a feed that looks like one long, crazy poem which manages to somehow capture the zeitgeist in user-generated rhyme.

4. Pixel Sorter

Send the Pixel Sorter bot an image, and it re-sorts the rows of pixels according to a few predefined rules. The results land somewhere between strange and beautiful. Send it your selfies for a new perspective on what you see every day in the mirror.

The Twitter bot takes comments from glowing movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and swaps out the film titles and actor names with prominent figures or shows from Fox. Almost five years later, it’s still Twitter mashup gold.

Orson Welles famously said he watched "The Five" 40 times before he made "Citizen Kane." It's easy to see why. #PraiseFOX

7. Here’s your reminder

This Twitter bot is all about self-care. @TinyCareBot reminds you to do all the little things that help keep you healthy, happy, and sane—drink water, look out the window, breathe deeply, stretch, and more. If you want a “friend” who keeps you grounded, follow this bot.

8. Simpsons Screens

This bot has a simple yet joyous mission: tweet a random frame from The Simpsons every 30 minutes. The stills come from episodes of the popular cartoon, which were originally aired from 1987–1998. Hardcore fans of the show might recognize the episode, but even without context these single frames manage to somehow contain so much.

10. Every Color

It’s a colorful world out there. The Every Color bot tweets a different color swatch every hour, based on a randomly generated hex code. Add this Twitter bot to your feed if you want to add a little brightness to your day.